Radio 4 liked my idea – a programme about climbing Ben Nevis is an easy sell – but they were concerned that my accent sounded too “English” to talk about Scotland without an explanation. Apparently referring to my Scottish heritage in the piece would stave off complaints.

I nodded, yes of course, how silly of me to forget that I’m not really Scottish – at least not when I open my mouth. Yet again a British broadcaster had kowtowed to that last acceptable whipping boy of national identity – the accent.

Perhaps in future I should carry my birth certificate (Aberfeldy Cottage hospital, Perthshire for those who really care). And there’s my school years where at Pitlochry High I fought back against those who mocked the way I talked, a reasonable pugilist (despite inheriting my mother’s rounded vowels). I won those battles and refused to change my accent. But the bigots are winning the war and the British establishment is letting them.

“The bigots are winning the war and the British establishment is letting them”

In my experience xenophobia – hard to discern from extreme nationalism – is as rife among certain Scots as it is among their English equivalents, they just have a different target.

A Scottish dislike of anything non-English

Unlike ardent Brexiteers in England keen to keep Europeans out, the canny SNP have cleverly framed their nationalist brand as an inclusive, tolerant one, but for many of their foot soldiers a key motivation is a carefully nurtured dislike of anything masquerading as English. Worse still, slightly posh-sounding English. Accent is every lazy xenophobe’s best friend – even the BBC can publicly discriminate on the basis of how one speaks.

Former prime minister Stanley Baldwin (Photo: Getty)

Perhaps, instead of worrying about the accent mafia, Britain’s leading broadcaster should work on the bigger malaise that is England’s cultural domination on-air.

If only England’s agenda didn’t hog the airwaves

Why not broadcast Scottish weather before English weather? Why not put Scottish football results before English football results? Why not talk about the NHS in Scotland for once, not just the one in England and Wales? If England’s agenda didn’t hog the airwaves there might be less cause for accent bashing.

The representation of four nations in one British package has long, complex roots. Interwar Conservative Prime Minister, Englishman Stanley Baldwin, spoke of his relief on St George’s day in 1926 that for once he didn’t have to bang the British drum, and instead celebrated being English. The sun was setting on empire and with it the Great British brand that had been built abroad – English nostalgia had never been more vogue.

“If England’s agenda didn’t hog the airwaves there might be less cause for accent bashing”

This Anglo-centric focus was heavily promoted via a new and growing broadcast media led by the BBC. In the shadow of England’s unchallenged cultural ascendancy the seeds of today’s bigotry were sown. Received pronunciation came to be synonymous with English dominance. A problem exacerbated in Scotland where the concentration of land ownership is the highest in the developed world; the disproportionate wealth of lairds has always sat uncomfortably next to the country’s working heartlands.

There are many of us ‘posh Scots’

It suits Scotland’s left-leaning political classes to question the nationality of every “posh” sounding, possibly Tory-voting, Scot. No matter that there are hundreds of thousands of Scots who speak without a distinct accent. Discrimination has always been a blunt tool.

After several years on air, Radio 4 has only just stopped receiving complaints about their Jamaican continuity announcer Neil Nunes. The colour of his skin is now off limits, but not so his Caribbean accent. North of the border the SNP have been quick to welcome immigrants to an “open” Scotland but a hoary old conundrum lies at the heart of their efforts. The vast majority of Scotland’s immigrants are English.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon (Photo – ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP/Getty Images)

The SNP say they are fine with that, even embrace a few Sassenachs in their ranks, but try sounding “English”, whatever that means, when representing your adopted country, never mind the one you were born in. There’ll always be someone who queries the absence of the right accent – nowadays apparently the only irrefutable stamp of belonging.

It’s worth reminding certain Scots (and the guilt-ridden BBC) that the 20th century’s great political scientist Benedict Anderson identified a nation as a political community imagined by the people who saw themselves as part of that group. I imagined I was Scottish, but my nationalism floundered on my accent. Unable to get broadcast work north of the border I headed south years ago.

Now apparently I can’t even talk about the country of my birth without issuing a disclaimer, lest someone who is properly Scottish complains. It’s hard to find a foothold in the face of such an inflexible identity, so I don’t call myself Scottish any longer – but nor could I ever chant Eng-GER–land at a football match. Heaven forbid!

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